


Pioneers

by Miss_M



Category: Alien (Prequel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fix-It, Getting Together, Grief/Mourning, Nightmares, Post-Canon, Robot/Human Relationships, Sexual Content, Slow Burn, Terraforming, Worldbuilding, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 11:13:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27969623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: Everyone looks to her as the captain who guided them safely to the promised land, like she’s some goddamn pillar of strength, and she’s so lonely.
Relationships: Katherine Daniels/Walter
Comments: 14
Kudos: 33
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Pioneers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anr/gifts).



> I own nothing.

When she has finished shaking and sweating, puking stomach acid and swallowing some flat-tasting water from a tube, grief rolls over Danny, a tidal wave which submerges her and fills her lungs so she can’t breathe. Seven years in stasis, seven years’ worth of cortisol buildup. She should write that up, transmit it to the researchers on Earth: _in cases where prolonged stasis follows intense periods of stress and negative emotion, the concentration of cortisol and related hormones in the human body can have an adverse effect on the subject upon exiting stasis…_

She laughs, while tears and snot drip out of her face. She sobs, her face contorting painfully after having been still for so long, the cryopod having stimulated her muscles to prevent atrophy while her face had been left in serene repose. She’s doubled over on the edge of her pod, watching her feet twitch with the violence of her sobs, the pattern her tears make as they drip on the floor.

“Here, Captain.”

Walter puts a cup of something warm in Danny’s hand – coffee, she nearly passes out from the smell, it’s so intense after the long, dreamless nothing of stasis. She chugs it too fast, burning her lips and tongue, spattering her cryosuit with it.

“Fuck,” she spits, chugs some more, keeps it down. Walter made it sweet, put in just the right amount of creamer. Her taste buds recognize the perfect cup of coffee straight away, even if her brain takes a moment to catch up and remember why it tastes so good, beyond just being coffee, warm, life.

Loss. Jake. The gap in the row of cryopods where his burnt-out unit used to be, is in Danny’s direct line of sight.

Walter rubs her back while she drains the cup, a steady motion, down her spine, brief separation, then his hand returns to the base of her neck and descends smoothly again. Synthetics are not strictly speaking machines, but the mechanical repetitiveness of his care is fine by Danny at the moment. She feels volatile enough for both of them, and in a second she’ll need to stretch, shrug off Walter’s hand, and heave herself upright, willy-nilly. What’s left of the crew – _her_ crew – is retching and shaking off the cryosleep all around her, and Mother is reciting facts about the fast-approaching Origae-6. Work to do.

*

Six Earth months after landfall, the skies of Origae-6 are crisscrossed by pinkish cirrus, stratus, cumulonimbus. Origae is cooler than Sol, it makes the sky’s evening splendor muted.

The _Covenant_ ’s terraforming module has extracted moisture from aquifers which also feed the lake in the location chosen for the first settlement, on the south continent. The module pumped the H20 into the atmo, broke up the surface rocks and crumbled them into arable topsoil, increased the O2 levels fractionally, so the settlers still gasp and get short of breath after long exertion, but the green things now rooted in Origae-6 will gladden their lungs as time goes on. They made this dry world which had belonged only to microbes capable of sustaining crops and wells and towns.

Or one town, for now.

Danny and Tennessee sit at a picnic table outside of Danny’s habitat one warm evening, while older children play a chaotic game of tag, human molecules bouncing off each other, screaming in the thickening dusk. They seem to have built up extra energy in stasis. The babies decanted from the MatureSac last week take up the challenge and start crying in the crèche hut: first one, then another, soon an entire off-key chorus of outraged wailing.

Tennessee feigns annoyance, gets up, squeezes Danny’s arm, and moves off, hollering at a couple of people along the way to come help him. The settlers include several doctors of various stripes as well as nursing staff, an OB-GYN, even a pediatric nurse, but Tee volunteered to help them and refused to go away when they replied they had the crèche covered. He loves putting the frozen fetuses in the MatureSac, monitoring their growth, decanting them when it’s their time. He denies this, says the paperwork is a pain in the ass, you could run an entire colony ship with less data entry and collation than is required by a single MatureSac load – but he loves it, all of it. He used to joke he and Maggie would make a dozen babies, populate Origae-6 all on their own. “Only if you shit them all out,” Maggie would clap back. “I ain’t pushing that many out of my hoo-ha, no way!”

“Shut up, you bunch of li’l bastards!” Tee sing-songs as he lopes toward the crèche.

“Shut up!” the kids playing tag pick up the call. “Li’l bastards! Shut up! Shut up!”

Danny wipes her eyes, laughing in spite of herself.

Since the end of their interstellar journey, the crew’s in-group dynamic has shifted. They are now in charge of running the settlement, yes, and they’re all very busy, but that’s not the reason why.

Ever since that godforsaken planet Oram made them explore, the survivors are divided into the intact couples and the amputated halves. Danny, Tennessee, Lope – they understand each other now in a way that, say, Upworth and Ricks can’t. The lone survivors share the same grief, the same wound, even though none of them can help the others as much as they’d like. It makes the couples nervous, they tend to avoid Danny’s eye when speaking to her. Apart from Tee and Maggie, Karine had been Danny’s closest friend on the crew, and Danny is secretly glad that at least she doesn’t need to deal with Oram without his wife.

The thought is shameful, for Danny has nightmares about that _thing_ which came at them out of the dark, sliced Oram in half, and took Walter’s hand off in lieu of killing her, Danny, before it vanished into the tall grass with a screech like fingernails on a windowpane. She knows she shouldn’t think ill of the late Oram. But she never could stand him when he was alive, and had he remained captain, they might have all died on that planet. The mission would have ended in catastrophe.

Danny listens to the children playing, their parents calling them to their habitats for the night, the babies settling down, the cows and goats – grown from frozen embrios too and decanted from a much bigger MatureSac – complaining at the night noises from their pens. She breathes in the mineral, vegetable, animal, human scents of Origae-6, and she’s glad that Oram died on that rock and made her captain, so she could contact Tennessee to come and get the rest of them the hell out before anyone else died. To hell with Oram’s precious rogue transmission, too. Let Weyland-Yutani send Marines to investigate that one.

Walter appears out of the dark, briefly startling Danny, and joins her at the table.

“I’m sorry,” he says in his equable way. “I didn’t mean to alarm you.”

“It’s fine. I was light-years away.”

“Were you thinking about Earth?”  
  
Danny considers lying and saying yes. But unlike Oram, she liked Walter from the start – she knows it’s fucked up to prefer a synthetic to a human, but there it is – and without his aid, they never would have made it. _She_ never would have made it.

“No,” she says. “I was thinking about that planet, you know which one I mean.”

He doesn’t nod, nothing so human. His gaze unwavering on Danny’s face. “Yes, I know.”

“What…”

They’ve never talked about this. Tee and she have had this conversation, but beyond the official report Danny filed upon returning to the _Covenant_ , in between calming everyone the fuck down and going back into stasis for the rest of their transit to Origae-6, the surviving crewmembers haven’t really been up to that discussion, not yet. Something on that rock infected Ledward and Hallett, maybe Karine and Maggie too; something else, maybe similar, maybe not, killed Oram. Danny wakes up often, having sweated right through her nightclothes and sheets, from dreams of those creatures swarming all over the place, rushing on all fours through the wild wheat, their screeches reverberating against the tall mountains.

“What do you think that creature was?” she asks Walter.

The advantage of androids over simple robots, she thinks while she waits for his response, isn’t just their deceptive humanness. It’s that androids are not literal-minded. Their neural pathways, their _thoughts_ can jump ahead. One can have an actual conversation.

“I don’t know,” Walter replies without a trace of frustration in his honest ignorance. “Some malformation of evolution. Based on the little data we have, it is unclear how they breed or raise their young. They seemed capable only of slaughter, and not for nourishment but because…”

“Because they enjoyed it,” Danny finishes.

They are silent for a moment. Danny knows, and Walter doesn’t remind her, that imputing human motive to other creatures is folly. Yet as far as she’s able to read him, Walter seems as comfortable accepting the idea as Danny herself is, if much less perturbed by it than she feels.

“Have you given any thought to where you might like to build your cabin?” Walter asks.

Danny recoils. The wash of anger leaves her shaking, both because he changed the subject to what he thinks will be a pleasanter topic for her and because he lacks the programming to understand why that’s wrong.

“I’m not building the fucking cabin,” Danny says, more harshly than she’d like. She knows she’s being unfair.

“I thought…”  
  
“You thought wrong, okay? The cabin by the lake was Jake’s idea, it was his dream. I don’t want it just so I’ll have someplace to put his ghost.” She stands up. Walter follows her with his eyes but doesn’t move to stand too. “I’m going to bed. Goodnight, Walter.”

“I would like to build a cabin,” Walter speaks up behind her.

Danny stops in her tracks, torn between bursting into tears and making a run for her habitat, and rounding on Walter with curses and fists flying.

“Not your cabin, or Jake’s cabin,” Walter continues. “I have some ideas of my own. It could be a place for the whole community. Or for the children.”

Danny glances at him over her shoulder. He’s standing by the table now, watching her. “We have all the materials, and I’ve found instructions on woodworking and basic principles of construction among Jake’s public files in the _Covenant_ ’s database,” he says.

Danny shrugs. “Do whatever you want,” she says and stomps off, feeling ungracious and finding little comfort in it.

*

Walter’s cabin is a picturesque marvel, of course. Danny can’t escape hearing all about it: every angle perfectly straight, every joint just so, no leaks in the roof, no foundation issues, although it’s smaller than Jake used to describe. Walter picks a spot on a flat cliff overlooking New Lake Superior, where the light fills the one-room structure all day, the wind whistles in the eaves during rainstorms, and the lake seems close enough that one could lean out of a window and scoop up a handful of its glowing water. No one lives there. Walter has a tiny habitat to himself, even smaller than Danny’s, a shelter from the elements rather than a place to live. Teenagers go to the cabin to neck, kids run there when they cut class, couples walk there hand in hand when the time permits or bring out their broods for picnics.

The thing that was stressed to the _Covenant_ ’s crew repeatedly during mission planning but never ceases to grind Danny’s gears in implementation, is that stable couples were presumed to be the necessary foundation for a successful colony. A certain couple-essentialist ethos quickly becomes inescapable in the settlement. The use of MatureSacs necessitates group childrearing and the rapid organization of extended family structures formed by multiple couples and their children, both born and decanted, plus grandparents, aunts, cousins, yet people keep clinging to individual significant others.

Tennessee says that people need something solid to hang on to in this brave new world, and Danny suspects she’s just annoyed because she’s alone and most of the others have someone, but it still bothers her. She tells herself that’s why she avoids Walter’s cabin, as she insists on calling it – because it’s where people go with their sweethearts, their spouses, their children, and she lives in a habitat for one, and everyone looks to her as the captain who guided them safely to the promised land, like she’s some goddamn pillar of strength, and she’s so _lonely_. Jake didn’t believe in the afterlife, but she still hopes he doesn’t begrudge her this: the desire for someone, the inability to let go of what was.

*

Danny is completely unsurprised when the government sends a comms packet demanding answers about what happened during the _Covenant_ ’s little detour under Oram’s command. She’s pretty much paralyzed with the of-courseness of it when she sees that the lead investigator is a Weyland-Yutani rep. They’re not even pretending this is purely an administrative or a security inquiry – the Company wants to know all about the nightmare critter for their own ends, and if that means they have to wait years for the transmission to reach Origae-6 and then as many years for the answers to be relayed back to Earth, well: human lives are short and cheap, but megacorps are forever.

Danny gathers the crew – after nearly six Earth years dirtside, they hardly refer to themselves as such anymore, but this business takes them right back to when the ship was their world – and says to them: “I’m not going to pull rank. I have ideas for how to handle this, but I want to hear from you all first.”

Tennessee, who got remarried six months ago and is raising a brace of newly decanted babies as part of his wife’s huge Pakistani-Korean family (Danny tried not to resent his ability to move on, and she was happy for him, and it was hard) is the first to speak up: “Fuck Weyland and fuck Yutani too. Fuckers.”

Ricks nods, and Upworth says: “They’re going to send a mission to that planet, aren’t they? And try to capture that thing that killed…” She glances from Danny to Lope and doesn’t name any names.

Lope looks like he’d like to spit, except they’re all crammed together inside Danny’s habitat and he catches himself just in time. “You bet they will. I’m surprised they didn’t send some suit all the way out here to debrief us in person.”

“That would be prohibitively expensive and undo the pretense of a government investigation,” Walter chimes in, but he doesn’t dispute the logic or the likelihood of what everyone else is saying.

Knowing that he was manufactured by and for the exclusive use of Wey-Yu, Danny watches Walter when she says to everyone: “So, we lie?”

“Hell yeah!” Ankor, participating via comm-link from the _Covenant_ ’s bridge, while Rosenthal leans over the back of his chair, nods, and pumps her fist in the air; they’re pulling a rotation manning the ship in orbit. Nods and murmurs of assent all around, both in Danny’s habitat and in orbit, with another smattering of colorful descriptions of the Company.

“Can we create a lie that won’t implicate anyone?” Walter says, holding Danny’s gaze.

“We have to feed someone to Wey-Yu,” Danny says. “They won’t accept that significant loss of life, including not one but two captains, could be down to a system malfunction or an accident. They’ll want someone to pin it on. I say we blame it all on Oram. It was his call to go down there, and Mother has a record of the objections I raised and he overruled. Once we were dirtside, everything happened more quickly than Oram could cope. It was all very confusing, and we are the known universe’s stupidest crew, we barely know what went down, you know the drill. And Oram’s was a failure of ability, not of good will to lead.”

Even that is more credit than she’d want to give the man, but it soothes everyone. They agree with Danny’s assessment of Oram’s leadership anyway, and none of them want to admit they preferred to deviate from the mission rather than get back into their pods after what happened to Jake. It helps that Karine isn’t around to make them all feel even guiltier than they already do.

After they’ve hashed out their story and what everyone’s variation of it should be, so they don’t sound too rehearsed when they record their statements, Danny turns to Walter while people trickle out into the night, calling their goodnights, promising to meet over a dram of something at the tavern later in the week. “Can you stay a minute? I have something for you,” Danny tells him.

From under her bed, she produces a storage box, and from the box, a mechanical hand – metallic and crude in comparison with Walter’s biolab sleekness, but Danny is quite proud when she shows him the sensors hidden inside the wrist cuff, which will link up with the severed connectors in Walter’s arm.

“It’ll probably need a lot of adjustment,” Danny rushes to add. “I don’t have the right equipment for synthetic repair, but short of sending you back to Earth, this should be somewhat helpful.”

She makes herself not fidget while Walter examines the hand. She’s nervous, and she hates it. Walter’s approval is neither here nor there, but it matters to her.

“You made this for me,” he says at last.

Danny waits. It’s not like him to repeat the already-known for added emotional weight.

Walter looks up, from the motionless metal hand he holds in his to Danny standing in front of him. “Thank you. That seems an inadequate thing to say.”

The nervous tension drains out of Danny, like pulling a plug in a bathtub: whoosh! She allows herself a wide, sincere smile – they’ve been formal with each other ever since he built his cabin, and Danny has been avoiding him in situations that didn’t involve one or both of them operating heavy machinery, or solving equations, or running simulations of crop acceleration and biosphere adjustment. But she’s never resented him.

Walter’s smile in response to hers is small, a mere distortion of the facial muscles, but Danny is fairly certain she’s never seen him smile before. She wasn’t sure he could, not _really_ smile, with his teeth, not just the reassuring grimace he wore on the _Covenant_ when running med checks on the nervous humans, or the one he adopts when children surround him and demand he lift a bunch of them at once, three or four hanging off each arm.

“Can we run preliminary tests and start making adjustments right away?” Walter asks, and if he were human, Danny would have called him eager. “Or is it too late for you? Would you prefer we did this tomorrow?”

“It’s not too late. Sit down.”

She gathers her tool roll from its cubby and joins Walter at her tiny dining table. He lays his arm before Danny unselfconsciously, but he keeps talking while she uncovers the severed connectors and checks that the sensors in the cuff will line up: “My programming does not allow for hubris, but I was made to be of optimal usefulness at all times. Many tasks are challenging to accomplish with only one hand, and…”  
  
“Walter. You’re babbling. Let me focus.”

“Yes,” he says while Danny applies an electrical tester to his arm, to see which connectors are still live, so to speak. “Of course. Apologies.”

*

Danny is standing hip-deep in dry grass and wheat stalks swaying in an evening breeze. The world is not reduced to the rustle of vegetation, the whisper of the wind, the murmur of a distant waterfall. No, the night is alive with agony: the creatures’ screams seem to tear the sky apart and shake the planet to its core. There are so many of them, they’re swarming over every rock, every patch of ground, coming out of the lakes and the rivers. They’re about to cover Danny and swallow her whole. They’re already there.

She jerks awake so violently, she almost falls off her bed, clutching her sweat-soaked top sheet to her chest, her hair sticking to the back of her neck. Nonsensically, she thinks that she needs a haircut.

Going back to sleep is impossible. She hasn’t had such a vivid nightmare in ages. Her heart’s pounding in her chest, and she can’t seem to get enough air, despite the steady improvement to the Origae-6 atmo.

Danny throws off her bedsheets and lurches out of her habitat, into the summer night. Barefoot on the dusty path leading past her home and some of the bigger, family habitats, past the animal pens, the cows lowing at her as she pads through the close, warm dark. The terraforming aimed for a temperate Earth summer but landed on something dryer and longer-lasting, the planet’s original biosphere and geology combining with the settlers’ intent into a hybrid outcome.

Finally, she reaches the large, flat rock by the road which leads to the lake, where people stop to rest and sunbathe. Danny collapses on the still-warm stone and lets the tears come, shaking as if she's feverish, her fingers clutching futilely at the dusty, pocked surface. She thought she was past the worst of it, but the more spaced out in time the nightmares become, the worse any single one seems to shake her.

Once she’s cried her fill, Danny wipes her eyes on the hem of her pajama top and realizes that Walter is watching her from a distance of only a few steps.

“Jesus fucking… How long have you stood there?”

“You were running without a pocket light. Are you in distress?”

Danny really wants to say something cutting and mean, but trying to fight with Walter is never as satisfying as she hopes it might be. She lies back on the flat rock, exhausted from her emotional storm, and repays Walter’s non-answer with one of her own: “I am so tired of always living in those few weeks, from when Jake died until we got back into stasis. So tired.”

Walter sits beside her on the rock. He isn’t wearing his metal hand, she notices – maybe he takes it off at night, a routine of his own although he doesn’t sleep. Ramrod straight even when he’s sitting down, the dark outline of him blocks out the winking light of the _Covenant_ ’s main module, minus the habitats and supply pallets, as it glides between alien constellations along its orbit around Origae-6.

“Would you like to know what it was like for me, after I put those of you who remained alive back into stasis and was alone with Mother again?” Walter asks.

Danny can barely speak, the sweat and the tears on her skin making her feel chilled despite the warmth of the night. “No.” She catches the glint of Walter’s eye when he turns his head to look at her. “That is, yes, if you want to talk about it. Just not right this second, please.”

“Would you like me to make you feel better?” Walter asks.

As if her nightmare isn’t enough, apparently this is a night for emotional whiplash. Danny huffs a laugh: “How?”

The second she says it, she knows that she is stupid and has been alone for too long. Then she knows that she is even stupider than that, because synthetics don’t flirt, but also synthetics can’t refuse a direct order from a human, and Walter is a new-generation model. He responds to suggestions and expectations too.

His hand is unexpectedly warm on Danny’s pajama-clad thigh. She knows his systems simulate lifelikeness whenever possible, she touched his skin and his flesh when calibrating his prosthetic, but still the weight, the solidity of his hand on her leg makes her quake.

She’s only touched herself since Jake’s death, and Walter wastes no time in pushing past the elastic of her waistband, his fingers grazing her stomach, her bush.

Danny surges up and grabs his wrist. “You don’t have to do this. I’m not giving you an order. It’s okay.”

“Katherine.”

Her breath catches in her throat like a pebble. It has been so long since anyone called her by her given name, sometimes she almost forgets that her parents didn’t name her Danny. Walter’s hand lies motionless on her skin, neither pushing past her hesitation nor retreating.

“Katherine, I am doing whatever I want.”

She frowns, trying to puzzle out just how much of a leap he’s made in this strange conversation they are having, when her own words come back to her, spoken to him in anger and bitterness and frustration when he expressed a desire to build her cabin for himself.

Well, hell.

Danny loosens her hold on Walter’s wrist, tries to caress it without seeming to either drop it or force it to move, wonders how he’ll interpret the caress, both the touch and the emotion behind it, and she says: “Go on, then. If you want to.” Like she doesn’t care at all if he does it or not, if he wants to or not.

Walter’s long fingers stroke her at once right where she needs it, so she lies back on the warm stone, and she closes her eyes, and she lets herself just feel, still in disbelief.

At least, that’s how it starts, but Danny turns greedy. Walter’s fingers move with a smooth, repetitive sameness, and it’s good, the fullness of it, but it lacks the raggedness, the need Danny craves. She shoves her own hand down her pants, and covers Walter’s hand, and shows him how to touch her. He must have been programmed with very detailed files about the female anatomy. The sarcasm in Danny’s head is no match for how her hips are moving with his hand, her back rubbing against the flat, pocked surface as she hikes up her legs, feet planted firmly on the rock so she can push harder, and says, “More. Please.” Walter leans on the elbow of his shortened arm and watches her. He doesn’t have breath with which to stir her hair or cool her flushed face, but his wiry weight half leaning over her reminds her how much she’s missed ( _wanted_ ) this, and he doesn’t object to her hugging him close while he fingers her. His dry lips on Danny’s jaw, light as a moth, when she starts to come, thrill her as much as they unsettle her. She thrashes and moans her fill, out in the open of a semi-terraformed world, under stars that still startle her with their arrangement every time she looks up in the nighttime.

When she’s caught her breath and come back to herself, Danny notices Walter examine his fingers then put them in his mouth, down to the third joint.

“You can taste?” she blurts out.

“I am an advanced model,” he says, and Danny nearly thumps him for being smug till she remembers herself.

“Um.” It isn’t like her to be so bashful, but then she’s never got off with an android before. “If you would like something, you need only ask.”

He knows so much about her, from his programming and from observation – she is at a disadvantage despite Walter existing for her and the others’ sake. She doesn’t know if he was built for sex, or can want it, despite his declaration of wanting to touch her. She doesn’t know if he can feel pleasure (he showed no pain when he lost his hand, or when Danny poked at his arm while calibrating the mechanical one), or what he thought about in all the years he manned the ship and watched over the crew. She doesn’t know much, it seems.

“I would like to try many things,” Walter says, and Danny is simultaneously intrigued and nervous again, “but right now I want to show you something.”

She sits up. “Not the cabin.”

“Yes, the cabin.” It doesn’t come out as banter, of course not. “I finished it four Earth years, seven months, and twelve days ago, and you are the only settler who’s never visited. The lake looks very striking at night, with the geoluminescence.”  
  
He doesn’t say that Jake would have wanted her to see it; one advantage of Walter being an android, he isn’t tone-deaf in that extra special way.

Danny takes his hand, holds it between both of hers. His fingers are sticky: artificial saliva and her juices. Brave new world indeed.

She thinks about what it means to terraform and colonize a new world: you bring your children and your cattle and your street grid, and your ghosts and your nightmares too, and you claim the space for all of them to thrive and multiply. And still you can’t calculate or prepare for everything.

“Alright,” she says. “But I’m not having sex with you there, and we’re not staying till dawn.” Drawing boundaries on new territory, arbitrary but all-important.

“Of course,” Walter replies, ever the voice of reason. “There’s no bed at the cabin. It’s really more of a folly than a home.”

Danny throws her head back and utters a laugh which seems to her to reverberate across the landscape. In that moment, she doesn’t care at all that someone in the town might hear her.


End file.
